From the Letter to the Hebrews:
Lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint, but rather be healed. Pursue peace with everyone, and the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.
(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Hebrews 12:12-4 (NRSV) – February 13, 2013.)
The author of the Letter to the Hebrews is using an athletic metaphor, and borrowing from the Hebrew Scriptures, to make a point about endurance.
Taking up his own earlier metaphor of “running with perseverance the race that is set before us” (12:1), he echoes the Prophet Isaiah, “Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God.'” (Isa. 35:3-4a) He draws from the Proverbs, “Keep straight the path of your feet . . . .” (Prov. 4:26)
Endurance, also known as “fortitude,” is one of Christianity’s four cardinal virtues. In Freemasonry (yes, I’m a Freemason), this Christian virtue is defined as “that noble and steady purpose of mind, whereby we are enabled to undergo any pain, peril, or danger, when prudentially deemed expedient.” As a subject of preaching, I’m afraid, this virtue gets rather short shrift in today’s church. I suppose that may be because the church reflects the popular culture which, with its emphasis on self-expression and instant gratification, emphasizes a sense of entitlement to ephemeral happiness and comfort.
As we begin Lent, it is well to reflect on this virtue. This period of forty days is meant to be our spiritual union with Jesus in his time of desert testing. If ever there was an example of endurance or fortitude, it has to be those days of temptation in the arid land beyond the Jordan. Endurance is a part of our Christian heritage, going back to Jesus and beyond him into the centuries-long story of the endurance of Israel, God’s chosen people.
Endurance is also one of the four Buddhist virtues, although in that religious tradition it is called “eternity”. It is regarded as a quality of inner being which allows the practitioner to remain unswayed by the ever-changing circumstances of life while confidently challenging him- or herself toward enlightenment. It leads, it is said, to another of the Buddhist virtues, happiness, a kind of contentment that can withstand the ups and downs of human existence including death. This is quite different from the vacuous “happiness” of the modern age, that insipid self-indulgence buoyed by unprecedented affluence and rampant consumerism.
This Lent let us eschew the world’s “happiness” and strive for that eternal happiness common to the Christian and Buddhist faith traditions, that noble and steady purpose of mind, that quality of inner being, that eternal endurance that leads to enlightenment, that leads to God.
====================
A request to my readers: I’m trying to build the readership of this blog and I’d very much appreciate your help in doing so. If you find something here that is of value, please share it with others. If you are on Facebook, “like” the posts on your page so others can see them. If you are following me on Twitter, please “retweet” the notices of these meditations. If you have a blog of your own, please include mine in your links (a favor I will gladly reciprocate). Many thanks!
====================
Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.
We are still reading through Paul’s correspondence with my Celtic friends of Anatolia. And, again, Paul is exasperated with them. They seem to be backsliding. I must admit, however, to some confusion here. Paul complains that they are “observing special days, and months, and seasons, and years.” What, I wonder, is wrong with that? Certainly the Jews, from whom Paul and Jesus came, observed special times, feasts, and seasons; and I’m pretty certain the earliest Christians observed Sunday as a “special day” – we still do.
“The tongue of a teacher” is a such a ripe and fruitful image — it calls to mind all those wonderful people who are so formative in our lives. I remember particular teachers from throughout my life who have been and still are forces that formed and form who I am.
I confess to a certain fondness for the Galatians. I’ve never been a really big fan of Paul the Apostle and I sometimes wistfully wonder how our Christian faith might have developed if he had not been its principal post-Ascension spokesperson. What if the Johanine community that produced the Gospel of John and the three letters that also bear his name had been more prominent? What if James and his insistence on works of mercy because “faith, if it has no works, is dead” (James 2:17) had been more influential than Paul’s assertion to the Romans that salvation is “by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works” (Romans 11:6)? Well, we’ll never know . . . but apparently the Galatians were listening to someone suggest an alternative to Paul’s understanding of the Christian gospel and, as a result, he wrote them this letter. Anybody that could so upset Paul that he would call them “you foolish Galatians” (Gal. 3:1) gets high marks in my book! That the Galatians were also Celts with whom I, as an Irish-American, share an ethnic heritage gives them additional credit.
As anyone who knows me will testify, I am no Calvinist! But hats off to John Calvin who wrote about these verses, “God has manifested himself to be both Father and Mother so that we might be more aware of God’s constant presence and willingness to assist us.” (Commentaries, Vol. 8, Baker Books:2005) Isaiah’s words on behalf of God are among the strongest maternal images of God in Holy Scripture. Just three chapters later, speaking through the prophet, God will ask and declare, “Can a woman forget her nursing child And have no compassion on the son of her womb ? Even these may forget, but I will not forget you.” (49:14-15) And, again, Calvin wrote, “God did not satisfy himself with proposing the example of a father, but in order to express his very strong affection, he chose to liken himself to a mother, and calls His people not merely children, but the fruit of the womb, towards which there is usually a warmer affection.”
So let’s admit right off the bat that we have a problem here. Where the progressives and liberals among us would much prefer to read Paul condemning the institution of slavery, he does not. Instead, he simply admonishes slaves to be good slaves and masters to be good masters, and even goes so far as to analogize a Christian’s relationship with God (or Jesus) to slavery. This just doesn’t sit well in the modern mind and provides plenty of ammunition for those whom Friedrich Schleiermacher addressed as religion’s “cultured despisers.” We would much rather Paul hadn’t said this.
My late brother had a cartoon cut from some magazine taped to the door of his university office (he was a professor of political science and constitutional law) for years. I suspect it came from either Playboy or The New Yorker, but I really don’t know. It depicted two scientists working at a chalk board. To their left on the board was a complicated looking mathematical formula and to their right, another one. Connecting the two sets of numbers were arrows drawn from and to the words, “The a miracle occurs.” One of the scientists speaking to the other says, “I think you should be more specific here in step two.” (Of course, I’ve been able to find the cartoon on the internet and will post it with this meditation.)
It’s a familiar enough parable, this story of the farmer who sows his seed only to have most of it fail to produce for one reason or another. Jesus’ use of the broadcasting seed as a metaphor for preaching is reassuring to those of us who preach on a regular basis. It seems to say it isn’t our fault if what we preach has little or no impact on the hearers; it’s the fault of the “soils” into which we are sowing – maybe “Satan” snatched it away, or maybe the hearers have no “depth”, or maybe they are just too concerned with “cares of the world”. 
Mark, Matthew, and John all report that on another occasion Jesus commented, “Prophets are not without honor except in their own country and in their own house.” One can’t get much more dishonored that being accused of being crazy!
I held off offering a meditation on this Inauguration Day, the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday, for a variety of reasons. Throughout the day, however, this particular bit of St. Paul’s Letter to the Church at Ephesus kept returning to my mind. The Episcopal Church uses this in dialogue form in our baptismal liturgy, so it is familiar to us. The idea that we are all in some way united is a part of our Anglican ethos.
